After interviewing pilots who had survived the crash, they finally decided to investigate the cockpit…and what they found changed the course of aviation forever. Instead, data gathered through records and pilot interviews revealed that in 22 months, there had been at least 400 crashes of a similar nature.
It took the end of the War and intervention of Air Force Psychologist Paul Fitts and his Aviation Psychologist colleague Alfonse Chapanis, to realise that if it were in fact pilot error, the accidents would be random. Whether it was stress or trauma, incompetence or freak accidents, pilots were taking the blame for the accidents that were causing damage to machinery worth thousands of dollars and more importantly, the death of crew members.
This went on for a while and the incidents piled up - pilots misreading dials, pilots falling out of the sky because they could not tell which side was up when flying, pilots unable to read instruments clearly and even an instance of a pilot running a plane up and down the runway during an attack, because the cockpit instruments had been rearranged in what was a new model and he couldn’t figure out how to fly. On coming in to land, the wing flaps would slow the plane down…and it would then hit the runway, skid and keel over, leaving carnage in its path. The plane that could hold a crew of 10 -pilot, co-pilot, bombardier, navigator, flight engineer and 5 gunners - and could take down the enemy in a rugged flying fortress, was unable to land without a strange phenomenon occurring.
They just could not seem to stick the landing. Pilots would navigate the skies, weaving through and tearing down Japanese and German forces, surviving shrapnel and bullets, before making it back as “…a series of holes held together by ragged metal”. The Flying Fortress, a menace in the sky and the pride of the US Army Air Corp in World War II. These were just some of the statements used to describe the B17 Bomber, a.k.a.